MALAYALAM LANGUAGE

also spelled Malayalam, language of the Dravidian family, spoken in southwestern India; it is the official language of the state of Kerala. Malayalam has three important regional dialects and a number of smaller ones. There is also some difference in dialect along caste lines and a distinction, called diglossia, between the formal, literary language and the colloquial tongue. Both the literary and colloquial languages use many words borrowed from Sanskrit. Closely related to Tamil, Malayalam differs from it in such aspects as the absence of personal endings on verbs. Like the Dravidian languages generally, Malayalam has a series of retroflex consonants (e.g., t, d, n; sounds pronounced with the tongue tip curled back against the roof of the mouth), and it indicates such grammatical categories as tense, number, person, and case with suffixes. Malayalam has a written tradition dating from the late 9th century, and the earliest literary work dates from the early 13th century. The language uses a script called Koleluttu (Rod script), which is derived from the Tamil writing system. The Tamil Grantha script also is used. The history of Malayalam literature dates to the 13th century. Indigenous ballads and folk songs belong to the earliest times. Later literature was long influenced by Sanskrit, the language of scholarship, and by Tamil, the language of administration. All the branches of literature known in the West are cultivated today.